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Wednesday, 23 August 2017

Decimator Concept refined...

I've been messing a bit with my Decimator idea, which has to started to distill into a concept;

I don't dislike the Decimator per se, but it just doesn't really fit in with the current chaos aesthetic of 40k - the armour plates are angled instead of curved, and it is extremely top heavy, where most of the Daemon Engines now have most of their weight in the body.

I've used a Blood Slaughterer torso (scavenged from my Maulerfiend conversion from years ago), stripped it, and mounted it on the Decimator legs, with the shin guards replaced by Maulerfiend arm guards, for a nice curved armour look. I thought long about it, and decided to make an armoured belly, instead of a fleshy one - fleshy stuff just seems to me like the easy way out. I made it from a blob of milliput, roughly shaped, and when it was dry I filed and scraped it into the right shape (much easier to me, than sculpting armour with sharp edges) It obviously still needs trims and detailing, perhaps some teeth sticking out from it.

The head is a rough mockup, just an idea I'm trying out - very interested to hear you guys opinions. :)

Also, the cannons (soul burner petards) are a bit of a pain - I've tried making some on my lathe (more on that on the bottom of this post), but I'm not quite sure they work - maybe they just need detailing, maybe they need to be bigger, or maybe they just shouldn't be curved, or maybe I just need to cough up the 24 pounds for the originals. Let me hear your opinion and ideas.

A side shot, so you can se the rather bizarre profile - I kinda like it, it's very different from most other walkers and Daemon Engines.

Update:

I wasn't happy with the tubular cannons, so I was sitting on the FW webshop, credit card in hand, ready to press "check out", when I got an idea. I have loads of Ectoplasma cannons lying about (since nobody wanted them for the last two editions), so I decided to do something with them; I glued them together with some plastic spacers between, giving them a gap of 5-6 mm, to broaden them quite a bit. After this I used LOTS of milliput and Milliput/greenstuff mix to fill in the gaps, cover the plasma coils, and make a new look for them. After this was dried I filed, scraped and sanded them smooth, and sculpted on the trims, and added some teeth were the gap was. They're obviously not finished yet, needing minor detailing work, and perhaps some spikes and/or tubes, but I think they look enough like petards to justify using them, and far enough removed from ectoplasma cannons as to not be confused - but let me hear your thoughts. :)

The lathe;
I was in the fortunate situation that one of my students father (I'm a school teacher by day) knew that I'm somewhat of a woodshop/workshop fanatic (I also work a lot with wood and metal, besides plastic crack) and one of his neighbours was widowed some years ago - her husband used to be a machine worker, and had a lathe in her basement, which was just collecting dust - I could get it for free if I would just come get it. I joyfully drove to her house with my dad (who has 40+ years experience with lathes) to inspect it, only to find that it was freaking enormous. I had hoped that I could just take it in my car - that was not going to happen. Anyway, I talked to my dad (and the missus) and concluded that I would never get a chance to own a machine like that again, and since we had the space in our garage (where I have my workshop), I got some professional movers to do it for me. Good thing, that; they were 3 gigantic guys, who struggled with it for 2 hours. It weighs 450 kg (about 900 pounds), and IT. IS. GLORIOUS. It has all the accessories and tools with it, is handmade in Denmark in the 1930's, and he has kept it in great shape:

It is a great tool to have at ones disposal and something I'll enjoy for many years to come.